Sibelius Festival opens at UH

Finnish composer Jean Sibelius had an unsentimental, even harsh, view of his own work.

“Other composers may manufacture cocktails of every color,” he said to his publisher. “I offer the public pure cold water,” as noted in the program book for the Sibelius Festival at the University of Houston.

Anyone who has heard the exalted up-and-down theme in the final movement of Symphony No. 5 may dispute the coldness of Sibelius’ style. There’s a majesty and humanity — and considerable cocktails of color — in many of his works, as the UH Moores School of Music suggested in opening its three-concert event honoring Sibelius (1865-1957), Finland’s greatest composer.

The three evenings in the Moores Opera House cover different aspects of Sibelius’ oeuvre. Thursday’s matched his second most popular symphony, No. 5, with Cantus Arcticus, a Concerto for Birds and Orchestra by today’s dominant Finnish composer, Einojuhani Rautavaara.

Today’s event explores chamber works, some not even published, plus music for other ensembles. Saturday’s features choral and orchestral works, including the chorus/orchestra version of Finlandia.

For me, Rautavaara’s work was the only thing that mattered on Thursday’s program. His music has seldom been heard in Houston, and the Cantus Arcticus, which I had fortunately heard before in Berlin, is a magical piece typical of contemporary works the Houston Symphony overlooks.

Rautavaara went to the Arctic Circle to record the birds there. He then edited a soundtrack, tailored for each of the three movements, that created a web of noise to envelop the orchestra’s live playing. Think of the low roar a huge flock of birds can create and you’ll get one idea Rautavaara used in the soundtrack. Exquisite caws formed another.

For the orchestra, Rautavaara used a small number of devices. He began with an imitation of a bird, played with great beauty by flutist Daniel Alexander, that expanded into sometimes undulating, sometimes chattering conversations among the woodwinds. Other, less programmatic melodies soared over hushed, often lush accompaniment. Repeated chordal/chorale passages perhaps referred sideways to the Orthodox Christian music of nearby Russia, a longtime enemy, rival and threat. And so forth.

During the performance by the Moores School Symphony Orchestra and conductor Franz Anton Krager, the soundtrack was mostly too loud, blanketing the orchestra’s playing rather than enhancing it. Still, conductor and ensemble delivered the essential beauty and magnetism of the piece in plain, unsentimental terms.

Sibelius’ Fifth Symphony lags only the Second Symphony in popularity. Krager and the orchestra gave an honest account, but the conductor seemed more a traffic cop than interpreter. The playing and interpretation had insufficient flexibility in phrasing and transparency in sound (though some of the violins’ unison and octave melodies were sumptuous).

The opening work was the Overture in A Minor, a seldom-heard piece that starts with bleaker that Sibelius was describing in his quip. But the piece also had some charming, jaunty moments and almost syrupy harmonies that, again, belied the meagerness of his self-assessment.